


head first in the river

by ghostwit



Category: One Piece
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Couldn't resist giving this a happy ending whoops sjdghj, Dissociation, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Marineford, Post-Payback War, more specifically:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27112990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostwit/pseuds/ghostwit
Summary: Marco’s first mornings on Sphinx are empty-handed stumblings through grief; He sits in the wreckage beyond the waterfall and wakes with the light spearing over a fractured window, crossing jagged lines over his still form.(Marco, after the Payback War.)
Relationships: Fushichou Marco | Phoenix Marco & Shirohige | Whitebeard | Edward Newgate, Fushichou Marco | Phoenix Marco/Portgas D. Ace (vaguely implied)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 28





	head first in the river

**Author's Note:**

> This was a stylistic exercise so it may be more stilted than you're used to if you're familiar with my writing; I tried to cut down on the complex, multi-clause phrases and play things very straight, though I don't think I completely succeeded, couldn't help myself. I think there's an unspokenness about grief that works best divorced from metaphor sometimes, I'unno. Please let me know any critiques!
> 
> I also drop this scheme near the end to signify a shift in mindset, hope that's not too jarring for anyone--or maybe too subtle? ah. 
> 
> TW: emeto, some self-starvation, inadvertent self-harm but like. the nature of Marco's powers downplays that. Lemme know if I missed anything else.

There is the brilliance of anger and there is grief and there is the watermelon-scoop empty space between, after the Phoenix knits together its shattered bones to trap the dark beneath its skin. There are the echoing footsteps of a staggering not-crew that doesn’t run from certain doom, but watches her wrap dark fingers around their throats and leave them limp and empty-eyed to retreat like kicked strays. 

(Or maybe it is just him, in the aftermath. Malnourished after a lifetime of foie gras and all too willing to nuzzle, lick, eat any hand that feeds.) 

“It’s his treasure, I’ll protect it.” It’s easy to say when he has a crew with their faces upturned to him as if he is the sun. Alone, in a rowboat, with wounds that seem to scrape his insides clean of every good thing he’s ever done and could ever do, mantras are only for the desperately faithless. 

* * *

Marco’s first mornings on Sphinx are empty-handed stumblings through grief; He sits in the wreckage beyond the waterfall and wakes with the light spearing over a fractured window, crossing jagged lines over his still form. The townspeople are kind, but there is an innocence about them that strikes anger--it is somewhere beyond his emotional range, in the aftermath of the war (both of them, two of them), to see others with a world beneath their feet and a sky overhead. His spine judders when he sits up, and he crawls, hand-over-knee, to the doorway. There’s dried blood beneath his nails, and his breath catches somewhere in his throat, dripping out, as if through sieve, as jagged sobs. The shower, mercifully, runs--cold, sputtering rust over his still clothed form, head tilted against cracked tile. 

The wall of the kitchen gapes, blasted apart, but he bypasses it for the doorway, follows a trail of wide stones to the water. He dries in the sun where the sand makes his neck itch. The shuddering of tacky skin against the beach feels, inexplicably, good _.  _ Eyes closed, he lets phoenix fire scrape his empty innards when he feels a pang of hunger. 

He lays for a while, radiation pulling the skin of his chest tight. It’s his first sunburn since youth; he can feel the stretches of tension tracking up his throat and the tops of his shoulder. He feels like a man, and something about it makes him want to plunge into the sea and drown. The sun feels good. He lays. 

The sun sets at some point and he rises when the sand starts to cool. It flutters down his pant leg where it had dried along the fold, tickling like a lover’s touch. He blinks so hard he feels light-headed but he doesn’t sit. 

He can’t recall which house he’d stayed in the night before so he doesn’t bother to look. It’s the same, to sleep at the foot of an empty bed. There’s a crick in his neck when he wakes. He walks into town, barefoot, in his dirtied clothes and buys a case of eggs, a loaf of bread. He is suddenly so much smaller than he is, steps slotted in the indents left by the former orphaned Newgate to inhabit the island. His fingers twitch with desire to nick an apple, slip a palm into a passerby’s pocket; The disgrace to his father makes him cough. 

He wanders to the water again, tripping painfully on the rocks on his way down. Half of the eggs shatter. The water is beautiful. He cracks an egg against his teeth, flexing his single palm the way Thatch had taught him to let the yolk and whites drop through, straight down his gullet. The texture of it makes him want to vomit, slime clinging to his cheeks and throat, so he washes it down with the end slice of bread. He crumples the shell in his hands, flicks a piece into his mouth before throwing up between his legs. The intact yolk splits on the sand, sunset fracturing in a puddle of bile. 

Three days go by like this: cold bread to soak the taste of vomit from between his teeth, clothes stiffening with sand, phoenix, shivering and neglected, tucked away as lines and gouges form in his face. By the fourth, he can’t quite make out the waterfall from the abandoned settlement. 

There is something spidering along his skull that pleads responsibility, but the sand is warm and the sun feels good and it hurts to walk on his sprained ankle. He does it anyway, guides a hard-faced sphinx to the gap in the rock and receives a rough-tongued lick in the face that makes him laugh and it sounds like someone else to him so he has to stop. 

The next time he showers, he picks the sand from his hair, runs flat palms under his armpits and scrubs down his body with fingers still coarse. He smells of something horrid, and it makes him think of--want to plunge into the sea. And drown. 

The waves are choppy on the way to their graves but it doesn’t matter because Marco makes it anyway. The flowers are freshly replaced which he doesn’t note as odd and some spill into his lap when he sits. He wants to crawl into them, pull them around himself but he doesn’t. He pours three cups of sake. 

He talks to his father until the sun sets. There are no more environmental markers so he talks to his lover until he can feel blood trickling down the back of his throat and thinks to himself that it’s enough. There’s snot drying on his sleeve and it makes him want to shower again. 

When he sees the dinghy he’d rowed in, he’s infused with such vibrant anger that he splinters it on the downstroke of a talon that he doesn’t remember summoning. He regrets it, even when the phoenix croons in cathartic triumph. He cries as he flies himself… home. 

He wakes up in the cabin the villagers had afforded him and the dust motes are pale and bright and he mutters to himself,  _ Hotarubi.  _ It makes him laugh and he stays like that, on the floor, reaching up to touch the flickering lights, overblown with nearsightedness, and wishing for warmth. He says thank you to Ace. There are clothes in the wardrobe, too, and that makes him happy. He is smiled at when he purchases a pack of cigarettes, and he sits on a stoop with it dangling between his teeth and his shirt hanging loose so his mark is dark against his chest. 

Someone offers him a light and says it’s a beautiful day. He nods. There’s a sturdiness in the step of the sphinxes as they plod down the street, the children tugging on rope-cord tails, that make him feel something heavy tugging in his guts. The man is watching him still, lighter aloft. He tilts his chin up to receive the light, fishes out a second cigarette to offer it to the other man, who takes it.

“You’re Newgate’s boy, aren’t you?”  _ Oh.  _ Marco’s hands go numb and he wants to run but he really doesn’t. The smoke burns his throat and bile is rising to meet it. “Thank you.” 

_ Oh.  _

* * *

There is sunlight spilling through the sparse wood and he can feel it clearing the salt from his gears, stuck cognitions clicking once, twice against each other before grinding forward with a groan that resonates through his marrow. Marco’s next morning on Sphinx, he walks into town and apologizes; taking the hands of every villager he can find between his own and shaking with head lowered. Most thank him profusely, and he laughs dismissively, eyes crinkling at the edges. One woman takes his hands again to laugh along with him, and a familiar, protective warmth stirs in his throat with such fierceness he is, for a second, utterly lost. She doesn’t see through her squeezed eyes, but she pats him on the back when she withdraws, lets his tremor dissipate under her firm hand. Some mutter condolences, and he smiles the same, fragile under the attention. 

Another woman, old and narrow-faced, grins at him when he bows his head, “Oh, you’re awfully polite. Nothing like him.” 

His head tilts, a pleasantly sedate, close-mouthed smile making its way to his features, “You’re not the first to tell me, unfortunately-yoi.” 

“Fortunately, I’d say!” She laughs, slaps at her own knee before grimacing, crumpling a little. He can’t help the regenerating flame that rushes to his finger-tips, and her face lights with an expectant, wizened curiosity. She talks him through the night, of his father in a way that is painfully clumsy and unflattering in a way that makes his heart soar, the way  _ he _ knows him, with the existence of the Strongest Man In The World as simply man--simply scruffy, fierce orphan with a compass pointing towards family. He lends his phoenix with ease, cracking light open in his chest and filling his veins with the roar of fire. 

A little girl approaches him with arms outstretched, traditional garb outlining her smile with stripes and circles, and he lifts her onto his hip without complaint, only a little laugh at her boldness. He’s about to amend her pirate etiquette when she grins, “You smell a lot better than last time!” 

He blinks down at her--this newfound myopia really does need some further investigation on his part, though he supposes forty-four is a fine enough age, if any, to be picking up ailments--and chuckles.

“Sorry about that,” he clicks his tongue in thought, “I was having a hard time.” If he’s honest, he can’t remember anything about the past couple days. 

“I forgive you,” she says, and then, looking down a little in a way that makes Marco readjust her in his arms, “I understand.” 

Miraculously, it doesn’t hurt, and he feels no flare of anger--the way he had with any other consoling hand. Instead, he hopes, from the same place his phoenix trills from, that the girl can’t and never will understand the depths of his pain; to have had Captain of the Whitebeard Pirates, Edward Newgate, and his second division commander, Portgas D. Ace--his world, put simply, narrowed down and made succinct and candid--torn from him, crew rent apart in the hands of the traitor that had fractured the first bloody line in the sanguineus command. Still, she sees a man with his brain crawling into the acid of his belly as he lays in the sand and forgives his pains, sees her own tragedies in the jagged, absent facade of a man trundling barefoot through his late father’s hometown. 

Marco’s face melts into a smile, brushes away the thoughts of the transcendental nature of pain and humanity that whisk through his skull like autumn’s whorls of dead leaves because here is a little girl in his arms who looks to him for guidance, and there’s really not much else that could capture the mercies of  _ humanity  _ quite like this. 

“Thank you,” he says, returning, gift-wrapped, the words tossed at his beggar’s feet days prior. 

* * *

He works to clear some of the wreckage of the destroyed village, props wood over the rocks to create a walk down to the beach--scrubs his blood from the stones as he does, dried over and filmy with yolk. He sits in the sand with his glasses perched on his nose and--wants to plunge into the sea, maybe. 

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this in one sittingvery late at night so thank you very much for your patience if you read this through. Not really sure to class this as either success or failure in my mind: it simply is, ah. There was a lot of ideas that I crammed in here that I didn't really expand on by nature of the prose style--about the fight with Teach, about the dynamic with the crew, about Marco's thoughts/lackthereof--so I'm not sure if I liked that but it's good to exercise restraint and conservatism, sometimes >_> I truly do not know. 
> 
> Oh, yeah, also, posting this right away to make up for my fucked up upload schedule this month. Please forgive me. I have an essay that is 3 weeks overdue x3 x3 
> 
> Would mean the WORLD to me if you took the time to comment any thoughts--positive, negative, long, short, whatever--because this piece feels really messy to me. <3 
> 
> hazeism.tumblr.com


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